


Foam-born

by azarias



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Drowning, Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Supernatural Elements, Thomas lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 03:21:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10234697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias/pseuds/azarias
Summary: How Thomas Hamilton wed the sea, over the sea's objections.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Rahne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thetrickisnotminding/pseuds/thetrickisnotminding) for beta-ing at the speed of light, before I could chew my fingernails off.

Isaiah 57:20: _But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt._

In the lull of the storm, Thomas walked down to the beach and stopped where the waves grabbed at his ankles. There he waited.

It was said that the storm was fiercest near its heart, where the winds circled 'round the center like a cat letting terror build in the mouse it intended to torture. He had weathered several hurricanes in the New World, but only from high ground, secured inside a house with the shutters closed and barred while the wind raked at the roof. Whether one part of the storm had been worse than any other, he could not have said with any confidence, and had not been allowed to go outside and learn. Now he could see clear to the horizon across the chopping sea, and in the firmament black bands of clouds scraped past each other in an ephemeral, violent rite.

Not long now.

Carefully, he took off his boots and flung them as far as he could up the beach, where they might survive the surge. His coat he could toss nowhere near as far, and it would likely drown. No matter. It wasn't a very good coat and unlikely anyone would want it. The rest of his clothes he abandoned likewise, and there he stood, a lunatic naked on the beach, thin, greying, and scarred.

As the calm of the eye passed, a different sort of peace took its place. Between the whipping wind and slapping water, all other sound was driven from the world. Color went with it, land and sea bleached to shades of grey. The water rolled in relentlessly, now kicking nearly to his knees, and the wind blew hard crosswise. Both forces tried to push him away, back to the land.

He walked forward, one step at a time. The wet sand sucked at his feet, an ally, keeping him from falling back. When the water came to his waist, he could make no more headway, and it was all he could do to stand firm until a cresting wave washed over him and the undertow took hold, dragging him unresisting out to sea.

He tried to hold his breath but couldn't; the surging water battered him, forced the air from his lungs and scorched his mouth with salt. Despite his best intentions, he panicked and flailed, kicking his bare feet and clawing at the water with his hands, blind. He broke the surface, time enough to suck in one single breath in a world that had gone one single shade of grey, then he was forced down again.

From the moment the storm had made landfall, Thomas had rehearsed this in his mind. He had looked out at the ocean's violence and imagined it taking him, dashing his body against hidden rocks, bearing him out past the hope of rescue. In every way he could in those last hours, he had made himself ready. Imagining his own death, he had forced himself to think of it first as possible, and then as inevitable. Imagined the pain that would precede it; he had known sailors well enough to believe their promises that no man died peacefully in the water. Better by far to be hanged than drowned, for the rope would slowly strangle you but the sea would force itself inside you and burst you from within.

Had told himself, sternly, _This is what you will feel. The courage that you have now will not last. You will be afraid and you will cry for mercy and there will be no one there to grant it. Believe this now, because when you go down to the sea it will be too late to change your mind._ From his heart he had taken out despair and held it in his cupped hands, familiar with its shape and weight.

When he was a younger man he had clung to hope until it disintegrated in his hands; stubborn, he had let himself be dragged by it until the skin was stripped from his body and he had laid there raw and weeping, naked and blind, palms cut deep by the fraying cords of hope. There had been a letter, then. _My friend, it grieves me to tell you, but James and Miranda are dead_. It had meant, _You are alone. Your life now is all you will ever have._ Swept out past hope of rescue: that was a place familiar to him. But he had healed then, grown scars in place of skin. Gotten used to despair, as man could get used to anything not immediately fatal.

Kneeling in a pitch-black room today, he had prayed -- not for protection, for if this was God or His Son's realm, all Thomas's hopes were lost. Instead he had asked to be in truth the man he had once thought himself, whose strength and conviction would be enough to let him do what he must do. And if not strength, then he asked for the very madness he had spent ten years and more denying, for a madman could be weak but still carry out his plans. He'd heard no answer in that room, but above him the wind had howled and set the building shaking, and that had been enough.

Now he was beneath the waves and drowning, and he faced the knowledge that neither madness nor strength would save him. He had not come here to die, but in moments he must let out that last aching breath and find out if dying was all he had accomplished. Terror nearly overwhelmed him. He drew himself into a ball, wrapped his arms around his knees and pressed his hands against his mouth as if he could seal the air in his lungs in, make it last out the storm. Tumbled by the currents, he had lost the idea of up and down. Even if he struggled, tried to break for the surface again, he didn't know which way to go.

He opened his eyes, but all around him was darkness, mud and silt scraped up by the storm, and he could hear only roaring, the muffled rage inside the giant to which he had fed himself. The harder he fought, the greater the agony in his head and chest grew, burning him alive from the inside. Only the knowledge of his helplessness comforted him. He had chosen this, and here he was, gone beyond saving. Perhaps it was all right not to fight, if there was no chance of winning.

Because his body had no need of strength, because it could not save him, he channeled the last of it into one thought. _This is **my** choice._

Because the Father did not rule here, he didn't pray that he was heard. Surrendering, he let his hands drift free. He stopped fighting the water and his body was pulled open like a rag doll, limbs wrenching in their sockets, and it was so much worse than hanging, being drawn and quartered and _crushed_ from every side at once. His last lungful of air bubbled out in a scream that even he could not hear. All noble thoughts and plans went with it, left him only an animal who knew pain and wanted it to _stop_. To breathe in would make it stop, to die faster would make it stop, and so he sucked murky seawater into his lungs and begged his body to die.

And the water …

*

… comforted him. Where fire raged inside his chest, seawater sought out every spark and mastered it, calmed it, stroked the bruised and bleeding parts where he had held too long to air. The crushing pain in his head diminished inch by inch as the vice was unwound, the pressure inside and outside of him equalized. It was, he thought, the gentle death old salts had sworn to him the ocean would never grant.

Then he felt the strands of water, some cool, some warm, caress his bare body, and he knew it wasn't death at all.

He grinned fiercely, his mouth still sore from being wrenched open by his scream. _I **choose** this,_ he thought with all the force of his elation behind it, the joy of a man spared from -- not the gallows, nor even drowning. From Hell itself, growing old in peaceful solitude along the shore. A madman he might be at last, but here beneath the storm-dark sea he was held as in a lover's embrace.

James had said, _You can't want this._ He had said, _I'm sorry, Thomas, I'm so sorry for --_ All the things he'd done. The things that he'd become. For having the kind of power now he hadn't had before, when he'd been helpless to free Thomas, when he'd been only a man who couldn't stand against the force of all of England or even Thomas's father.

For Thomas's wife being dead, truly dead, and Thomas learning it was possible to grieve the same loss twice.

 _They called me a monster,_ James had said, _so I set out to prove them right. I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams._

_You can't want this._

He'd said this as if his saying it would made it true. He had turned away, ignored Thomas's beseeching hand, because he _knew_ what Thomas would want, if only Thomas would accept the facts. When he'd said, before all that, _I seem to have become a god,_ it had been less ludicrous, though the note of embarrassment in his voice had been endearing. James McGraw, the vicious Captain Flint, certain he could command another man's heart and be obeyed, but abashed at having achieved apotheosis.

Because Thomas loved every stubborn inch of the man, because he had from the very beginning, he elected to forgive the presumption. In time, he knew, he would even forgive the stunned pain he'd felt when James had walked away, leaving his palms slashed and bleeding where they'd grabbed again for hope.

In the warm depths of the ocean off the coast of Georgia, Thomas spread his arms and let the water have its way. He was blind and deaf still, lost in a world that had lost the concepts of _up_ and _down_ , but it didn't _matter_. His blood sang in his veins, and he didn't need to breathe, didn't miss the air. All that terror that had beset him was gone, but it left his mind sharp, his heart pounding, his skin sensitive, his body primed to flee or fight, or --

 _I want this_ , he thought, and had no way to know if his thoughts were heard. Could a god in his own domain look into a man's mind, if it wasn't given as a prayer? He had no intention of praying to James. But neither could he hide his arousal, even if he had wanted to, and the warm and cool waters eddied around him like a hundred loving fingers. Whether or not his thoughts were heard, his demands were understood.

A stream of water flowed across his lips, and when he opened his mouth it was just like a kiss, as messy and wet as he could want. He dragged his hands through the water, as if he could caress a body that wasn't there, and tendrils of water mirrored his movements, wrapping around his chest and pushing insistently between his legs, tickling his nipples and sac and even the soles of his feet. He moved his tongue, entreating, and the kiss in his mouth deepened, thickened, slid warm and heavy down his throat.

God, oh God, it had been a lifetime since he had had a cock in his mouth. It was _almost_ too much, all at once and stretching his mouth wide, forcing him to swallow lest he gag. He could taste only bitter salt and there was no end to it, no place where the other's body stopped that gave him room to retreat. He sucked at it greedily, his eyes squeezed shut, pushed against nothing as if he could lean in and draw his lover closer.

Water swept between his fingers, between each toe, every movement like a kiss and a questing tongue. He was held by a thousand hands and a hundred mouths, every part of him touched at once by a force that was tender and inexorable. Endless water that could break apart stone and scour cities from the land was being bent to his pleasure. The scars that striped his back and buttocks, marks that he had caught between two mirrors and knew were hideous, were attended to as gently as the rest. The numb ridges and tight, sometimes-painful troughs between them were massaged until his back relaxed and aches he had long since forgotten to feel drained out of him.

That relief alone was almost enough to bring him to climax. His hips thrust, dragged his swollen prick through the water, but no firmer tendrils touched him there. Around the column of water in his throat he moaned, the water itself shaking with his need.

His lust pounded at him like the waves, his body awakening all at once to pleasure he had been denied for so many years. How he had loved sex once; how he had burned for the touch of a man. He _remembered_ , body and soul. Since boyhood it had been strong, rough hands he wanted, a heavy, hairy body and mouth ringed with rough whiskers he dreamed about pressing against his own. He remembered the men he had made love to, the men who had touched him, and the one touch that had been best of all, now mirrored in seawater -- and James had thought he couldn't _want_ this?

Thomas touched himself. He dragged his fingers across his stomach, reached up to pinch his own nipple roughly, making a bright spot of delicious almost-pain. The water followed him, the feeling like a hot mouth sucking at his skin. When he reached for his cock, though, the water shook him roughly, pushed his hands away. Thomas thrashed, so close to orgasm but forbidden to take the final step.

As if his own ardor had bled into the water, the ocean's grasp became insistent, forcing his legs apart, a thick tendril like a silken rope snaking between his buttocks, exposing his hole. It probed at him, stroked roughly over his hole, and a thinner, sharper finger of water circled around the slit in the head of his prick. To be opened up and fucked like this, taken by the endless press of water like the phantom cock that thrust in his mouth, filled in every way he could be filled -- he nodded frantically, urging the water on.

But it drew back, hesitant -- oh James, always so afraid of the things he wanted, never quite able to believe that Thomas could treasure his desire and equal his carnality. Maybe Thomas would have time now to convince him, if he could survive the frustration.

All at once the water took his prick, wrapped around it tight and hot like a mouth that wanted to swallow him whole. Sucked at him, not at one part of his cock but all of it, every nerve attended to at once. That thick presence again, rubbing against his nether hole but not breaching him, the water in his mouth pulsing like a living body, his toes curling while black water sucked him down -- _finally_ he came, body arching like a bow, the water wringing pleasure from him even as it held him safe.

Thomas trembled at the end, tucked in the water's warm embrace but overcome. He hadn't walked into the storm to die, but that had always been the most likely outcome. Madmen who flung themselves into the sea seldom made it home again; more than that, he'd read his Greeks, and knew the general fate of mortals foolish enough to truly love a god. But Thomas had never fallen in love with a god, just a man, and had loved him through what he thought was death, and what he knew was Hell, and if James was changed by the years, well, so was Thomas. Now Thomas curled up like a baby in the heart of what James had become, and he shook as these last days and hours took their toll on him.

The water rocked him, careful and strong, and he drifted in the darkness until even that awareness faded away ...

*

… and he awoke.

Air and sunlight, a strong arm across his chest, a rough hand cupping his chin gently, keeping his mouth and nose above the water. Floating, still, but on the surface, his head pillowed on a shoulder more solid than the sea and no less broad.

For the first time in years, he felt _rested_. Not drugged nor despairing of pointless struggle nor even recovering from some sickness. Supported by the water he was weightless, and the warm body behind him buoyed his spirit likewise. For a time he floated there with his eyes closed, quiet.

He remembered drowning, remembered pain. It was real but muted, something that had been important at the time but no longer. He was like a woman who had groaned through labor but lay now triumphant with her babe in her arms, all her world focused on that new life and not the agony that had brought it into being.

Did that mean he had given birth to himself, he wondered? Certainly this was a new life, a better one, or at least a chance at better. Once before his pride had been his downfall, when he'd thought himself able to change a nation and had been surprised by wiser and stronger enemies. Today, though, he was the man who had struggled with the ocean itself, and here he was -- precisely where he had meant to be. Perhaps he was stronger now, though evidently no less foolish.

Opening his eyes he saw the bright blue of a sky that had been scoured clean by the hurricane, all the clouds blown away inland or back out to sea. The sun was bright and high but he felt no stab of pain through his eyes, no need to squint. Sandy yellow land curved around to his left and his right, a good swim away, green with salt-loving mangroves. A cove, somewhere on the coast.

There was nothing in the sky to tell him how long he had been under or how far he had been carried. Only that the storm had passed, and that he had been brought through it.

He took the hand that rested on his side, interlaced their fingers and held tight even as he freed himself from the encircling arms. When he put his feet down he found the sandy bottom, barely deeper than his waist. He stood and turned to face his deliverer, the prey he'd gone to sea to hunt.

"Hello, James."

Despite himself he knew his face was full of awe. Oh, but this man was beautiful. To look at James, as naked as he, was to remember why every mad decision he had made had seemed good to him at the time. Still seemed good, because they had brought him here.

James looked at him; the storm still roiled in his green eyes. "That was stupid."

"And yet, it worked."

"You could have died."

"I'm surprisingly hard to kill."

"I don't control the hurricane. No one does." His voice was thick and low, shaking as it always did when he felt some strong emotion he didn't dare let free.

Thomas squeezed his hand, and James's hand squeezed his. Thomas told him, "I _trust_ you." He would have to say that a great deal in the future, he thought, until James believed it.

What James had developed, some time in the years gone by, was the horrifying belief that Thomas could love _anyone_ \-- that he was some all-forgiving saint, able through his own innate goodness to love even the unworthy. How this belief encompassed how he had treated Miranda, Thomas did not know. He had loved his wife with every part of himself except his body, and he had blithely demoted her to second place when James had come into his life, unwilling to examine his own belief that she would be only _happy_ for him, gladly give up what he took from her. But it meant that James could believe in Thomas's love for him while also believing it was entirely external, some attribute of Thomas's that had no real link to any virtue possessed by James.

Trust, though. That Thomas could know the things James had done and trust him anyway, James could not seem to comprehend. But he was a clever man, was James, and would catch on eventually.

The tide rocked him gently, the rhythmic movements more like a cradle than like waves here in this sheltered cove. James stood landward of him, so the water's every movement urged Thomas gently toward him. Thomas saw no reason to resist, and he walked forward, nudging James slowly back toward the beach. He kept James's hand secure in his, ready to be Israel if James tried to flee.

When the water was near their knees he took James's chin in hand and pressed against him, chest to chest and mouth to mouth, drinking him down like he had the water. As if despite himself, James responded, and Thomas let go his hand only when James's arms went around him, holding him close.

"How much of that did you feel, when I was under?" he asked, barely parting their mouths enough to speak. He felt dizzy from the kiss though he didn't entirely know if he still needed to breathe.

James drew his head back, looked at him bewildered. "All of it. I felt all of it."

All of it, the drowning and the pain? He hadn't intended -- but it was done, and he had no wish for James to dwell on it.

He smiled, wicked, and recalled a part he very much wanted to revisit. "So that very thorough buggering you teased me with --" James's eyes widened.

He kissed James again, a promise. "Later. We have time."

James shook his head, though he didn't fight Thomas's arms. "If you give yourself to the sea enough times, eventually the sea won't let you go. Believe me, I know."

"Yes," was what Thomas said. His triumph.

 _Light_. He felt so full of light. If you looked through him, you might see a rainbow, like sunbeams refracted through the spray.

"James, listen to me now. My love for you is not a possession you can sacrifice. My desire for you is not something _you_ can control. You can turn me away, you can tell me that there have been too many years and miles between us, or that in your exalted state you do not want the burden of me." He pressed his fingers to James's mouth, cutting off the reply. "But you cannot change _me_."

Strange how he could say it without passion, these thoughts that had so recently consumed him. But here on this beach he was free in a way he had never been, naked and unconcerned as Adam before the snake. He wanted James to understand.

"You haven't had a say in how I feel about you since the first time you laughed at me and told me all the ways my ideas were wrong." How he had loved this stubborn, brilliant man, since well before he'd known that he could have him.

Something primal as the storm they'd weathered rose up in Thomas, and he bore James down to the sand, just at the edge of the waterline. The waves licked around them, surrounding James's head in a watery halo every time they washed in and withdrew.

Thomas laid out his terms there on the shore: that James the wild sea was loved in all his deepness, his heart owned and cherished in the fathomless dark. Greedy, Thomas touched him, learning the new contours of his body and remembering the old. Thomas kissed his broad, solid shoulders, the softness of his belly, his very human cock that stirred most gratifyingly beneath Thomas's mouth. He nuzzled in the hair of James's thighs, wondering about that beard James wore now and how it would feel between Thomas's legs. He'd had it when he came back to London, one day before disaster, and Thomas had had only a few hours to enjoy it ...

James took hold of his shoulders, drew Thomas back up his body. Thomas went, but leisurely, letting his tongue seek out dips and hollows where saltwater pooled, his hands tracing over scars as thick and gnarled as Thomas's own. At James's chest he lingered, drawing one hard brown nipple into his mouth and then the other, back and forth so that neither felt neglected. James moved beneath him, using the little leverage Thomas afforded him to rut his cock against Thomas's stomach. Gratified by the success of his efforts, Thomas continued to tease him until James cried out and wrapped his legs around Thomas's waist, demanding.

It occurred to Thomas this was a good way to get sand in places he'd rather not have it. He didn't pause at the thought, though. There was a god on this beach, and it wasn't Thomas. Sand was James's problem.

His prick nudged at James's hole, hard as he had been below the waves. It had taken him a week to convince James to let him do this the first time. Thereafter, James had asked for it -- demanded it, because James didn't have it in him to beg. But he yielded so sweetly to Thomas all the same, when Thomas took his prick in hand and pushed inside, the seawater proving all the slick they needed.

Sodomy; what a multitude of meanings that word could comprise. On ship, James had told him, it meant men who took advantage of the boys, the unpopular and the weak, heaped on them the abuses women suffered on land. But it also meant men who were frightened and alone and found what solace they could together. And it meant men like him and James, who were as God had made them and could be no other way.

He dug his feet into the sand, thrust into James ungentle but tender, rocking like the motion of the waves. James's hands cupped his face, made no attempt to control Thomas's body, his green eyes wide and wondering as Thomas mastered the storm within them.

Thomas asked him, his voice rough, "Will you let me go?"

Gone past words, James shook his head. Thomas pressed his legs wide and bent to kiss him. He covered James's face with kisses, not just his mouth but his cheeks and jaw, the tip of his nose, his forehead that wrinkled up in pleasure just as it did in pain. Everywhere he tasted salt, and when he kissed the corners of James's eyes he found beneath the salt something unbearably sweet.

Time became an abstract concept when one was potentially immortal. The only clocks that mattered were their hearts that raced together, their bodies that moved in sync. The sun had moved behind the mangroves when James cried out and pulled Thomas hard against him. Thomas spilled within him, dragging his prick through that tight sheath and relishing the feeling as it grew wetter around him, slicker with his seed. Timeless James might be now, but still Thomas could leave his mark.

Warm even in the shadows, they lay together, Thomas tucked against James's side and his head pillowed on James's chest. The sand was no great trouble, it turned out, and Thomas smiled to have his hypothesis confirmed. Sand was obedient to the sea.

"Grow out your hair for me," he murmured. Silent, James nodded his assent and drew Thomas's fingers to his mouth to kiss their tips.

Much later, unconcerned, James said, "You realize neither of us have any clothes."

Thomas propped himself up on his elbow, smiling down into James's face. "Fortunately, I know a pirate. I hear they're good at finding things of use."

They laughed together as the sun went down, and even in the darkness there was light.

**Author's Note:**

> Something something Chuck Tingle.
> 
> (Secret note: this is a Rivers of London crossover and James is the _genius locum_ of the Gulf Stream. Casefic to come, hopefully.)


End file.
